From the CEO of ActiveState Software

Bart Copeland

As President & CEO of ActiveState Software, Bart Copeland brings more than twenty years of management, finance, and technology business experience to his role. With a passion for technologies that help people lead more productive and enjoyable lives, Bart is currently focused on ActiveState’s private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, Stackato. With his vision for PaaS as an enabler to accelerate cloud adoption and value in enterprises, Bart is actively involved in the strategy, roadmap, business development and evangelism of Stackato. Bart is also an active angel investor and serves as a director on a number of other tech companies. He holds an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix and a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia.

Want to Leapfrog AWS and Win the Cloud War? Move Up the Stack!
The cloud computing infrastructure and platform market is expected to be a
$43 billion market by 2018 and account for 11% of enterprise IT spending. At
this point in the war we can say that AWS is the winner of the cloud
infrastructure market segment only. The platform market (and what I believe
is the more lucrative segment) is still up for grabs. The recent revenue
announcement by AWS demonstrates what they mean for the industry and their
focus on cloud since the beginning has given AWS leadership status. Microsoft
and Google, of course, have been working hard, albeit lagging, in the battle
for the number two spot. So do the tech giants and telcos go head-to-head and
try to take top spot or just be satisfied with a lower place finish and grab
as much share as possible? Has AWS won the "Cloud War"?
Has ... (more)

Why Docker Is Not Enough for Enterprise IT
I want to start by saying that, at ActiveState, we absolutely love Docker. We
think it's phenomenal technology that is really becoming the global currency
of the cloud. We've written about Docker a lot on the ActiveState blog -
we've celebrated its birthday, discussed evolving technologies surrounding
it, and shown how we've integrated Docker into Stackato. But, I wanted to
share with you why we feel Docker alone is not enough for the enterprise.
Two Major Issues Faced by Enterprise IT
First, I'm going to discuss two underlying problems th... (more)

It used to be so easy. The company needed more IT infrastructure, so you
bought more components, built more technology, and scrambled to keep it all
well oiled. Then along came the cloud and the world shifted under your feet -
or perhaps more accurately, over your head. Suddenly they wanted you out of
the server room and (instead) in the boardroom, assessing the services of
cloud computing vendors and discussing the cost benefits of the new
technology. And then it's all "strategy this, planning that." But you keep
thinking to yourself: What was wrong with the old stuff? And do th... (more)

Forget About PaaS. It's About Enabling Applications
Over the last couple of years I have talked to numerous enterprise customers,
analysts, industry pundits, and others interested in cloud technologies, and
one thing is abundantly clear - Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems to mean
different things to different people. But the term PaaS is irrelevant - it's
just noise. What is relevant, and what is important, is what PaaS does:
enable applications. That's what enterprises care about. They want to
accelerate application development to get products to market faster and into
users' ... (more)

Remember the early days of the cloud? Outsourced application hosting seemed
so...alluring. Public-cloud providers like Google, Heroku, EngineYard and
DotCloud seduced us with promises of cost-efficiency, scalability and
convenience. Early adopters spun off a few VMs, connected the users and
prepared for growth. And when that corporate growth arrived, the public cloud
would grow too.
At least that was the vision; yet the reality is more complicated. Public
cloud deployment entails hidden costs. Enterprise growth introduces new
challenges - challenges like data privacy, security a... (more)